Elizabeth David

Life and career

Early years

David was born Elizabeth Gwynne, the second of four children, all daughters, of Rupert Sackville Gwynne and his wife, the Hon Stella Gwynne, daughter of the 1st Viscount Ridley. Both parents' families had considerable fortunes, the Gwynnes from engineering and land speculation and the Ridleys from coal mining. Through the two families, David was of English, Scottish and Welsh or Irish descent and, through an ancestor on her father's side, also Dutch and Sumatran. She and her sisters grew up at Wootton Manor in Sussex, a seventeenth-century manor house with extensive, early twentieth-century additions by Detmar Blow. Her father, despite having a weak heart, insisted on pursuing a demanding political career, becoming Conservative MP for Eastbourne, and a junior minister in Bonar Law's government. Overwork, combined with his vigorous recreational pastimes, chiefly racing, riding, and womanising, brought about his death in 1924, aged 51.

The widowed Stella Gwynne was a dutiful mother, but her relations with her daughters were distant rather than affectionate. Elizabeth and her sisters, Priscilla, Diana and Felicité were sent away to boarding schools. Having been a pupil at Godstowe preparatory school in High Wycombe, Elizabeth was sent to St Clare's Private School for Ladies, Tunbridge Wells, which she left at the age of sixteen. The girls grew up knowing nothing of cooking, which in upper-class households of the time was the exclusive province of the family's cook and her kitchen staff.

As a teenager David enjoyed painting, and her mother thought her talent worth developing. In 1930 she was sent to Paris, where she studied painting privately and enrolled at the Sorbonne for a course in French civilisation which covered history, literature and architecture. She found her Sorbonne studies arduous and in many ways uninspiring, but they left her with a love of French literature and a fluency in the language that remained with her throughout her life. She lodged with a Parisian family, whose fanatical devotion to the pleasures of the table she portrayed to comic effect in her French Provincial Cooking (1960). Nevertheless, she acknowledged in retrospect that the experience had been the most valuable part of her time in Paris: "I realized in what way the family had fulfilled their task of instilling French culture into at least one of their British charges. Forgotten were the Sorbonne professors. ... What had stuck was the taste for a kind of food quite ideally unlike anything I had known before." Stella Gwynne was not eager for her daughter's early return to England after qualifying for her Sorbonne diploma, and sent her from Paris to Munich in 1931 to study German.

Actress

After returning to England in 1932 David unenthusiastically went through the social rituals for upper-class young women of presentation at court as a débutante and the associated balls. The respectable young Englishmen she met at the latter did not appeal to her. David's biographer Lisa Chaney comments that with her "delicately smouldering looks and her shyness shielded by a steely coolness and barbed tongue" she would have been a daunting prospect for the young upper-class men she encountered. David decided that she was not good enough as a painter and, to her mother's displeasure, became an actress. She joined J. B. Fagan's company at the Oxford Playhouse in 1933. Her fellow performers included Joan Hickson, who decades later recalled having to show her new colleague how to make a cup of tea, so unaware of the kitchen was David in those days.

From Oxford, David moved to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, London, the following year. She rented rooms in a large house near the park, spent a generous 21st birthday present on equipping the kitchen, and learned to cook. A gift from her mother of The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel was her first cookery book. She later wrote, "I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes."

At Regent's Park David made little professional progress. The company was distinguished, headed by Nigel Playfair and Jack Hawkins, and, in the leading female roles, Anna Neagle and Margaretta Scott. David was restricted to bit parts. Among her colleagues in the company was an actor nine years her senior, Charles Gibson Cowan. His disregard for social conventions appealed strongly to her, and she also found him sexually irresistible. His being married did not daunt either of them, and they began an affair that outlasted her stage career. Chaney comments, "Cowan was the ultimate outsider. He was working class, left wing, Jewish, an actor, a pickpocket, a vagabond, who lived in caves in Hastings for a time. Her mother called him a 'pacifist worm'. He was a sexual presence, and slept with anything that moved." David's mother strongly disapproved, and tried to put a stop to the affair. She arranged for her daughter to spend several weeks holidaying with family and friends in Malta in the first half of 1936 and in Egypt later in the same year, but in her 1999 biography Artemis Cooper comments that David's lengthy absence failed to detach her from her involvement with Cowan. During her stay in Malta, David was able to spend time learning from her hostess's cook, Angela, who was happy to pass on her expertise. Although she could produce elaborate grand dinners when required, the most important lesson she taught David was to work day in, day out, with all available ingredients, showing her how to make an old bird or a stringy piece of meat into a good dish.

France, Greece, Egypt and India

After her return to London in early 1937, David recognised that she was not going to be a success on the stage, and abandoned thoughts of a theatrical career. Later in the year she took a post as a junior assistant at the fashion house of Worth, where elegant young women from upper-class backgrounds were sought after as recruits. She found the subservience of retail work irksome, and resigned in early 1938. Over the next few months she spent time holidaying in the south of France and on Corsica, where she was greatly taken with the outgoing nature of the people she stayed with and the simple excellence of their food. After returning to London, and disenchanted with life there, she joined Cowan in buying a small boat—a yawl with an engine—with the intention of sailing it to Greece. They crossed the Channel in July 1939 and navigated the boat through the canal system of France to the Mediterranean coast.

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 halted their progress. After stopping briefly at Marseille they sailed on to Antibes, where they remained for more than six months, unable to gain permission to leave. There David met and became greatly influenced by the ageing writer Norman Douglas, about whom she later wrote extensively. He inspired her love of the Mediterranean, encouraged her interest in good food, and taught her to "search out the best, insist on it, and reject all that was bogus and second-rate". Cooper describes him as David's most important mentor.

David and Cowan finally left Antibes in May 1940, sailing to Corsica and then towards Sicily. They had reached the Strait of Messina when Italy entered the war on 10 June. They were suspected of spying and were interned. After 19 days in custody in various parts of Italy, they were allowed to cross the border into Yugoslavia, which at that point remained neutral and non-combatant. They had lost almost everything they owned—the boat, money, manuscripts, notebooks, and David's cherished collection of recipes. With the help of the British Consul in Zagreb, they crossed into Greece, and arrived in Athens in July 1940. By this time, David was no longer in love with her partner but remained with him from necessity. Cowan found a job teaching English on the island of Syros, where David learnt to cook with the fresh ingredients available locally. When the Germans invaded Greece in April 1941, the couple managed to leave on a civilian convoy to Egypt.

Able to speak excellent French and good German, David secured a job in the naval cipher office in Alexandria. She was quickly rescued from temporary refugee accommodation, having met an old English friend who had an "absurdly grandiose" flat in the city and invited her to keep house for him. She and Cowan amicably went their separate ways, and she moved into the grand flat. She engaged a cook, Kyriacou, a Greek refugee, whose eccentricities (sketched in a chapter of Is There a Nutmeg in the House?) did not prevent him from producing magnificent food: "The flavour of that octopus stew, the rich wine dark sauce and the aroma of mountain herbs was something not easily forgotten." In 1942 she caught an infection that affected her feet. She spent some weeks in hospital and felt obliged to give up her job in the cipher office. She then moved to Cairo, where she was asked to set up and run a reference library for the British Ministry of Information. The library was open to everyone and was much in demand by journalists and other writers. Her circle of friends in this period included Alan Moorehead, Freya Stark, Bernard Spencer, Patrick Kinross, Olivia Manning and Lawrence Durrell. At her tiny flat in the city, she employed Suleiman, a Sudanese suffragi (a cook-housekeeper). She recalled:

Post-war England

Returning after her years of Mediterranean warmth and access to a profusion of fresh ingredients, David found her native country in the post-war period grey and daunting, with food rationing still in force. She encountered terrible food: "There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad in the hole. I need not go on." In London, she met George Lassalle, a former lover of hers from Cairo days, and their affair was rekindled. The couple went to Ross-on-Wye in November 1946 for a week's break, but were stranded in the town by the season's inclement weather. Frustrated by the poor food provided by the hotel, she was encouraged by Lassalle to put her thoughts on paper.

Hardly knowing what I was doing ... I sat down and started to work out an agonized craving for the sun and a furious revolt against that terrible cheerless, heartless food by writing down descriptions of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. Even to write words like apricot, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds, produced assuagement. Later I came to realize that in the England of 1947, those were dirty words I was putting down.

When her husband returned from India in 1947, David immediately separated from Lassalle and resumed the role of wife. With the aid of Stella Gwynne, David and her husband bought a house in Chelsea, which remained her home for the rest of her life. Tony David proved ineffectual in civilian life, unable to find a suitable job; he ran up debts, partly from a failed business venture. What remained of the spark in the relationship soon died, and they were living separately by 1948.

Veronica Nicholson, a friend with connections in the publishing trade, persuaded David to continue writing, with the aim that she write a book. She showed some of David's work to Anne Scott-James, the editor of the British edition of Harper's Bazaar, who thought the writing showed a widely travelled person with an independent mind. She offered David a contract, and David's work began appearing in the publication from March 1949.

David told Scott-James that she planned to publish the articles as a book, and was allowed to retain the copyright by the magazine. Even before all the articles had been published, she had assembled them into a typescript volume called A Book of Mediterranean Food; many of the recipes ignored the restrictions of rationing in favour of authenticity, and in several cases the ingredients were not available in British shops. David submitted her manuscript to a series of publishers, all of whom turned it down. One of them explained that a collection of unconnected recipes needed linking text. David took this advice, but conscious of her inexperience as a writer she kept her own prose short and quoted extensively from established authors whose views on the Mediterranean might carry more weight. She submitted the revised typescript to John Lehmann, a publisher more associated with poetry than cookery; he accepted it and agreed to an advance payment of £100. A Book of Mediterranean Food was published in June 1950.

Italian, French and other cuisines

Lehmann and David agreed that her next book should be about Italian food; at the time, little was known in Britain about Italian cuisine and interest in the country was on the rise. She received an advance of £300 for the book. She planned to visit Italy for research, and wanted to see Douglas in Capri again, but received news of his death in February 1952, which left her deeply saddened.

David left London in March, arriving in Rome just before the Easter celebrations. She toured the country, watching cooks at home and in restaurants and making extensive notes on the regional differences in the cuisine. While in Rome she met the painter Renato Guttuso; deeply impressed by his work, particularly his still lifes, she asked if he would illustrate her book. To her surprise he agreed and, while considering the fee of £60 absurdly low, he kept to his word and produced a series of illustrations.

Arriving back in London in October 1952, David began a relationship with an old flame from India, Peter Higgins, a divorced stockbroker; it was the beginning of the happiest period of her life. She spent the following months writing the book, recreating the recipes to work out the correct measurements. She felt less emotionally connected to Italy than with Greece and southern France and found the writing "uncommonly troublesome", although "as recipe after recipe came out ... I realized how much I was learning, and how enormously these dishes were enlarging my own scope and enjoyment". Italian Food was published in November 1954. At the time, many of the ingredients used in the recipes were still difficult to obtain in Britain. Looking back in 1963, David wrote:

In Soho but almost nowhere else, such things as Italian pasta, and Parmesan cheese, olive oil, salame, and occasionally Parma ham were to be had. ... With southern vegetables such as aubergines, red and green peppers, fennel, the tiny marrows called by the French courgettes and in Italy zucchini, much the same situation prevailed.

Italian Food was warmly received by reviewers and the public, and the first print run sold out within three weeks. The Times Literary Supplement's reviewer wrote, "More than a collection of recipes, this book is in effect a readable and discerning dissertation on Italian food and regional dishes, and their preparation in the English kitchen." Freya Stark, reviewing for The Observer, remarked, "Mrs David ... may be counted among the benefactors of humanity." In The Sunday Times, Evelyn Waugh named Italian Food as one of the two books that had given him the most pleasure in 1954.

1960s

In 1960 David stopped writing for The Sunday Times, as she was unhappy about editorial interference with her copy; soon afterwards she also left Vogue as the change in direction of the magazine did not suit the style of her column. She joined the weekly publications The Spectator, Sunday Dispatch and The Sunday Telegraph. Her books were now reaching a wide public, having been reprinted in paperback by the mass-market publisher Penguin Books, where they sold more than a million copies between 1955 and 1985. Her work also had an impact on British food culture: the historian Peter Clarke considers that "The seminal influence of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking (1960), with its enormous sales as a Penguin paperback, deserves historical recognition." Cooper considers that David's "professional career was at its height. She was hailed not only as Britain's foremost writer on food and cookery, but as the woman who had transformed the eating habits of middle-class England."

David's private life was less felicitous. In April 1963 her affair with Higgins came to an end when he remarried. For a period she drank too much brandy and resorted too often to sleeping pills. Probably as a result of these factors and overwork, in 1963, when she was 49, David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. She kept the news of the event within her close circle of friends—none of the editors of the publications she worked for were aware of the collapse—as she did not want her reputation as a hard worker to be damaged. She recovered, but her confidence was badly shaken and her sense of taste was temporarily affected; for a period she could not taste salt, or the effect salt had on what she was cooking, but her sense of the smell of frying onions was so enhanced as to be unpleasant for her.

In November 1965, together with four business partners, David opened Elizabeth David Ltd, a shop selling kitchen equipment, at 46 Bourne Street, Pimlico. The partners were spurred on by the closure of a professional kitchenware shop in Soho on the retirement of its owner, and the recent success of Terence Conran's Habitat shops, which sold among much else imported kitchen equipment for which there was evidently a market. Among her customers were Albert and Michel Roux, who shopped there for equipment that they would otherwise have had to buy in France.

David, who selected the stock, was uncompromising in her choice of merchandise; despite its large range of kitchen implements, the shop did not stock either wall-mounted knife sharpeners or garlic presses. David wrote an article called "Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless", refused to sell them, and advised customers who demanded them to go elsewhere. Not available elsewhere, by contrast, were booklets by David printed specially for the shop. Some of them were later incorporated into the collections of her essays and articles, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine and Is There a Nutmeg in the House? The shop was described in The Observer as:

Later years

Elizabeth David Ltd was never more than modestly profitable, but David would not lower her standards in search of a commercial return. A new manager was brought in to run the shop and David fought against many of his changes, but she was always in the minority against her fellow directors. The stress of disagreements over company policy—and the deaths of her sister Diana in March 1971 and her mother in June 1973—contributed to health problems and she suffered from chronic fatigue and swollen, ulcerous legs. Gradually her business partners found her commercial approach unsustainable, and in 1973 she left the company. To her annoyance, the shop continued to trade under her name, although she tried periodically to persuade her former colleagues to change it.

David's second book on English food was English Bread and Yeast Cookery, which she spent five years researching and writing. The work covered the history of bread-making in England and an examination of each ingredient used. She was angered by the standard of bread in Britain and wrote:

What is utterly dismaying is the mess our milling and baking concerns succeed in making with the dearly bought grain that goes into their grist. Quite simply it is wasted on a nation that cares so little about the quality of its bread that it has allowed itself to be mesmerized into buying the equivalent of eight and a quarter million large white factory-made loaves every day of the year.

In 1977 David was badly injured in a car accident—sustaining a fractured left elbow and right wrist, a damaged knee cap and a broken jaw—from which she took a long time to recover. While she was in hospital, English Bread and Yeast Cookery was published. Its scholarship won high praise, and Jane Grigson, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, suggested that a copy of the book should be given to every marrying couple, while Hilary Spurling, reviewing for The Observer, thought that not only was it "a scathing indictment of the British bread industry", but one done with "orderliness, authority, phenomenal scope and fastidious attention to detail".

Some of the research David undertook for English Bread and Yeast Cookery was done with Jill Norman, her friend and publisher. The pair decided that they should produce two further books: Ice and Ices and a collection of David's early journalism. Like her book on bread, the scope for Ice and Ices grew the more David researched the subject. The compilation of existing essays and press articles took less time, and in 1984 An Omelette and a Glass of Wine was published, edited by Norman who became David's literary executor and edited further David works after the author's death.

Books

From 1950 onwards David was well known for her magazine articles and, in the 1960s and '70s, for her kitchen shop, but her reputation rested and still rests principally on her books. The first five, published between 1950 and 1960, cover the cuisine of continental Europe and beyond. In the 1970s David wrote two books about English cooking. The last of her books published in her lifetime was a collection of previously printed essays and articles. From the extensive notes and archives left by the author, her literary executor, Jill Norman, edited and completed four more books that David had planned. Six other books published since the author's death have been compilations drawn from her existing works.

On the advice of her publisher, David constructed her early books to intersperse recipes with relevant excerpts of travel writing and scene-painting by earlier writers, and, as her confidence and reputation grew, by herself. A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) draws on nine authors, from Henry James to Théophile Gautier, in between eleven sections of recipes. Reviewers commented that David's books possessed literary merit as well as practical instruction.

Some critics, used to more prescriptive cookery writers, thought her approach assumed too much knowledge on the part of the reader. In her view, "The ideal cookery writer is one who makes his readers want to cook as well as telling them how it is done; he should leave something, not too much perhaps, but a little, unsaid: people must make their own discoveries, use their own intelligence, otherwise they will be deprived of part of the fun." In The New York Times Craig Claiborne wrote admiringly of David, but remarked that because she assumed her readers already knew the basics of cooking she would be "valued more by those with a serious regard for food than by those with a casual interest". The writer Julian Barnes commented that as an amateur cook he found David's terse instructions intimidating: of a recipe in Italian Food he wrote, "E.D.'s first sentence reads like this: 'Melt 1½ lbs (675 g) chopped and skinned tomatoes in olive oil' ... Melt? Melt a tomato? ... Could it be that Elizabeth David was too good a writer to be a food writer?" A later cook, Tom Parker Bowles, observes, "You don't turn to Elizabeth David for nannying, step-by-step instruction, or precise amounts and timing. She assumes you know the basics, and is a writer who offers inspiration, and wonderful, opinionated prose. Her recipes are timeless, and all her books wonderful works of reference (and tirelessly researched) as well as beautiful reads."

France

Two of David's best-known books focus on the cuisine of France: French Country Cooking (1951) and French Provincial Cooking (1960); France features prominently, though not exclusively, in another two: A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) and Summer Cooking (1955). She set the pattern for her books by grouping recipes by category, with sections linked by her chosen passages from literature. In her first book, Mediterranean Food, David presented chapters on soups; eggs and luncheon dishes; fish; meat; substantial dishes; poultry and game; vegetables; cold food and salads; sweets; jams, chutneys and preserves; and sauces. She broadly followed this pattern in her next four books.

David's view on the place of French cooking in the hierarchy of world cuisine is set out in her introduction to French Country Cooking: "French regional and peasant cookery ... at its best, is the most delicious in the world; cookery which uses raw materials to the greatest advantage without going to the absurd lengths of the complicated and so-called Haute Cuisine." She was a firm believer in the traditional French approach to buying and preparing food:

Good cooking is honest, sincere and simple, and by this I do not mean to imply that you will find in this, or indeed any other book, the secret of turning out first-class food in a few minutes with no trouble. Good food is always a trouble and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love, and this book is intended for those who actually and positively enjoy the labour involved in entertaining their friends and providing their families with first-class food.

Though not neglecting elaborate dishes—she devoted six pages to the choice of ingredients for and cooking of pot-au-feu or lièvre à la Royale (a salmis of hare)—David regarded simple everyday cooking as in some ways more demanding, and gave many recipes for "the kind of food which is eaten frequently in thrifty French households, and it is very good".

David emphasised the importance to cooks of careful and knowledgeable shopping for ingredients. She wrote chapters about French markets such as those at Cavaillon, Yvetot, Montpellier, Martigues and Valence. Despite a widespread perception that her view of food was essentially Mediterranean, French Provincial Cooking, by far her longest book to date, surveyed the cuisine of France from Normandy and the Île-de-France to Alsace, Burgundy, the Loire, Bordeaux and the Basque Country, as well as the south. Looking at the entire field of cookery books, Jane Grigson regarded this as "the best and most stimulating of them all".

Italy

Unlike its two predecessors, Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking, David's Italian Food (1954) drew little from anything she had already written. She spent many months in Italy researching it before starting work on the manuscript. With two successful books already published, David felt less in need of extracts from earlier writers to bolster her prose, and interspersed the recipes with her own essays and introductions to the various sections. The book begins with a chapter on "The Italian store cupboard", giving British cooks, who at that time were generally unacquainted with most of Italy's cuisine and methods, an insight into Italian herbs, spices, tinned, bottled or dried staples including anchovies, tuna, funghi, prosciutto, and chickpeas, and Italian essentials such as garlic and olive oil, both seldom seen in Britain in the early 1950s. The rest of the book follows the basic pattern of the earlier works, with chapters on soups, fish, meat, vegetables and sweets, with the addition of extra subjects relevant to Italian food, pasta asciuta, ravioli and gnocchi, rice, and Italian wine.

In addition to those in Italian Food, there are many Italian recipes and descriptions of the land and the people in David's other works. The first recipe in her first book, Mediterranean Food—soupe au Pistou—is of Genoese origin. Also in that book are recipes for bocconcini, osso bucco, and several Italian pasta and chicken dishes. Among the recipes in Summer Cooking is peperonata (pimentos or sweet peppers cooked with tomatoes in olive oil and butter) which was reprinted as the title article in a later selection from David's works. In An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, David printed Italian recipes including soups and omelettes made with hops (zuppa di lupolli and frittata con i loertis). Also in that book are substantial essays on Italian people and places. Is There a Nutmeg in the House? includes a six-page article on vegetable dishes from Mantua, and another of similar length on the variations of pizza in Italy and beyond.

Other Mediterranean lands and beyond

When David's first book, Mediterranean Food, was published in 1950 the British public was still enduring food rationing after the Second World War. Her evocation of the everyday plenty and excellence of Mediterranean food was revelatory, and although she did not reach a wide public until cheap paperback editions of her books came out in the mid 1950s, reviewers immediately spotted her importance.

In the introduction to Mediterranean Food David set out her basic premise: "The cooking of the Mediterranean shores, endowed with all the natural resources, the colour and flavour of the South, is a blend of tradition and brilliant improvisation. The Latin genius flashes from the kitchen pans. It is honest cooking, too; none of the sham Grande Cuisine of the International Palace Hotel." She conceded, nevertheless, that the food culture of the Mediterranean was not exclusively Latin, and flowered in "the mainland of Greece and the much-disputed territories of Syria, the Lebanon, Constantinople and Smyrna". She described the ever-recurring elements in the food throughout these countries as:

... the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines; the aromatic perfume of rosemary, wild marjoram and basil drying in the kitchens; the brilliance of the market stalls piled high with pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs and limes; the great heaps of shiny fish, silver, vermilion or tiger-striped, and those long needle fish whose bones so mysteriously turn out to be green.

In her other books David gives recipes from around the Mediterranean, including gazpacho and tortillas from Spain; dolmádés, and eggs with skordalia from Greece, mutton-stuffed aubergines, yoghurt soup, and a stew of carrots and rice from Turkey; and a Syrian dish of chicken with almonds and cream. From further afield she includes Mauritian prawn chutney; iced cucumber and beetroot soup from Russia; a Persian maqlub of aubergines, rice and mutton; Sikh kebabs and garam masala from India; and Armenian pizza, claimed to be older than the Italian version.

In a 2012 survey for the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, Carody Culver writes, "It is David's language, particularly her use of description that most strongly enforces the narrative and literary quality of Mediterranean Food. Her imagery, anecdotes, and literary quotes transform her recipes into stories of experience and memory. ... Ingredients and dishes are not just given as part of a list of instructions, but represented as part of a specific culture."

England

Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970) and English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) include a few British dishes from outside England, such as Scottish Arbroath smokies and bannocks; and Welsh salt duck and bara brith. David, like many of her generation and class, used the terms "England" and "English" to refer to the whole of Britain.

Some writers have believed David neglected the cooking of her own country in favour of Mediterranean cuisine. In the humorous magazine Punch, Humphrey Lyttelton held that she preferred "inaccessible and often indigestible saucissons" to "the splendid Cumberland sausage". In 2009 the food writer Tim Hayward accused her of "wide-eyed romantic twaddle", excessively focused on France and the Mediterranean. Chaney comments that when Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen was published in 1970, some of David's most ardent admirers were taken aback to find her extolling the British culinary tradition, "at its best ... as rich and rewarding as that of the Mediterranean". Cooper writes that although the change of focus from French and Mediterranean food to English surprised the public, David had been moving towards it for some time.

David treated her English topics in considerable detail: Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen is longer than Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking or Summer Cooking. She intended it to be the first in a series of three or even five books on English cookery: "It depends how much time I have ... Later volumes will deal with bread, yeast, cakes, creams and cheeses and egg dishes, and meat and game". They were never written, except for English Bread and Yeast Cookery, which is by nearly 100 pages the longest of all David's works.

David consciously followed in the path of Hilda Leyel and Dorothy Hartley in researching British ingredients and dishes. Like them, she looked back into regional history to find what she saw as "the traditions of a culture rooted to the soil" before "the ravages of the Industrial Revolution". She did not romanticise Britain's culinary past: "Farm and factory labourers, artisans and clerical workers, still lived on a very restricted diet ... their cooking facilities were so primitive and their equipment so scanty that only the most basic forms of cookery could be attempted". But her constant benchmarks were honest ingredients and uncomplicated cooking. She condemned—and explained the alternatives to—the artificial, the ersatz, the "notorious Chorleywood bread", and "all synthetic aids to flavouring ... Nobody has ever been able to find out why the English regard a glass of wine added to a soup or stew as a reckless extravagance and at the same time spend pounds on bottled sauces, gravy powders, soup cubes, ketchups and artificial flavourings".

Collections of essays and articles

Although David had drawn on her many magazine articles for material in her earlier books, An Omelette and Glass of Wine (1984) was the first straightforward anthology of her work. Compiled with the assistance of Jill Norman, it consists of David's selections from her essays and articles published since 1949.

The article from which the book takes its title is an essay on "the almost primitive and elemental meal evoked by the words: 'Let's just have an omelette and a glass of wine.'" Among the other subjects are profiles of people including Norman Douglas, Marcel Boulestin, Mrs Beeton, and "A gourmet in Edwardian London", Colonel Nathaniel Newnham-Davis. Several sections are devoted to descriptions of the markets of French country towns, and unpretentious restaurants and hotels in France. There are articles on lemons, potted meat, mayonnaise, pizza, syllabubs, truffles, and on the cuisines of Spain and Morocco. For most of the articles David provided either an introduction or an afternote, or both.

David had intended to publish a second such volume, and eight years after the author's death, Norman, her literary executor, published a sequel, Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (2000). Like its predecessor, it was drawn from magazine articles, essays and other earlier writings, to which Norman added articles written by David in the 1980s. The first section of the book is a short autobiographical piece, a rarity from David, who guarded her privacy carefully. David's interest in the historical aspects of cuisine is given scope in essays on the history of Oxo and Bovril, Alexis Soyer and the potato. Articles aimed at the domestic cook include "Do not Despair over Rice", "Making Ice Cream", and one propounding a view for which she was famous: "Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless". The New York Times called the book "this very appealing, completely absorbing miscellany. ... This is a book good enough to eat—and, in a way, you can."

Booklets

David wrote eight booklets on individual topics. The first two, The Use of Wine in Fine Cooking (1950) and The Use of Wine in Italian Cooking (1952), were commissioned and published by the wine merchants Saccone and Speed. David reused the first as a chapter in French Country Cooking.

For her kitchen equipment shop, David wrote Dried Herbs, Aromatics and Condiments (1967); English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes (1968); The Baking of an English Loaf (1969); Syllabubs and Fruit Fools (1969), and Green Pepper Berries (1972). Some of the content was taken from her previously published magazine articles, and some was further reused and expanded in her later books.

David's last booklet was Cooking with Le Creuset (1989) written for the French manufacturers of Le Creuset cooking ware.

Posthumous publications

In addition to Is There a Nutmeg in the House? three further books planned by David were completed and edited by Norman after the author died.

Harvest of the Cold Months (1994) is subtitled "A social history of ice and ices". David had been working on it intermittently for several years before her last illnesses. The book traces the history of ice in the cuisines of Europe from mediaeval times, when it had to be brought from the mountains and kept in ice houses. The Independent's reviewer described it as "not a cookery book but an awe-inspiring feat of detective scholarship ... sumptuous and stately". Reviewing the book in The Times, Nigella Lawson wrote that although it deserved a place on the shelves of anyone who cared about food, it revealed a waning of the author's energies, and "lacks her customary, high-spirited, if fierce, readability".

South Wind Through the Kitchen (1997) was the completion of one of the projects of David's later years on which she worked with Norman: a single-volume collection of the best of her extensive writings. Norman invited chefs, writers and David's friends to choose their favourite of her articles and recipes. Many of the contributors, such as the chef Simon Hopkinson, contributed an introduction or afterword to the pieces they chose. The extracts and recipes are taken from all David's books published by 1996. There are more than 200 recipes, organised in the customary way with sections on courses and ingredients—eggs and cheese, fish and shellfish, meat, poultry and game, vegetables, pasta, pulses and grains, sauces, sweet dishes and cakes, preserves, and bread—interspersed, as in David's earlier works, with articles and essays. The title of the book comes from an essay published in 1964 and reprinted in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, and is a reference to South Wind, the best-known novel by David's mentor Norman Douglas.

The last of the books planned by David was Elizabeth David's Christmas (2003). She and Norman had discussed such a book as early as the 1970s, but work on other projects precluded it. After David's death, Norman found when sorting out the author's papers that David had written and compiled far more material on a Christmas theme than anyone else had realised. The Christmas recipes David had most often been asked for formed the core of the book. Together with some Christmas recipes from Mediterranean Food, French Provincial Cooking, and Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, and revised articles published in previous years in magazines, they were turned into a 214-page work. The chapters dealt with the social and historical side of Christmas, first courses and cold meats, soups, poultry and game, meat, vegetables and salads, sauces, pickles and chutneys, and desserts, cakes and drinks. The book reprints one of David's most quoted sentences, first printed in Vogue in 1959, and included in Is there a Nutmeg in the House in 2000: "If I had my way—and I shan't—my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening."

Awards and honours

David won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year award in 1978 for English Bread and Yeast Cookery. She was also awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Essex and Bristol, and the award of a Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1976 and promoted to Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1986. The honour that most pleased her, however, was being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 in recognition of her skills as a writer.

In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II, David was chosen by BBC Radio 4 as one of the 60 Britons who have been most influential during the 60 years of the Queen's reign. In 2013 her portrait was one of a series of first-class stamps issued to celebrate the centenary of ten "Great Britons". In 2016 an English Heritage blue plaque was erected on her former home at 24 Halsey Street, Chelsea, where she had lived for 45 years; she was the first food writer to receive this form of recognition.

Legacy

The obituaries for David were warm and full of praise for her work and legacy. In The Guardian, the food writer Christopher Driver called her "this century's most influential cookery writer and scholar in English", while the obituarist for The Times wrote:

Elizabeth David was the doyenne of English cookery writers. She influenced the generations who came after her, whether they, too, were intending to be culinary experts or merely taking a well-thumbed Elizabeth David Penguin from the kitchen shelf for the next day's dinner party. "Elizabeth David says ..." was the regular way of resolving how much spice—and which spices—should be added to a stew and how much garlic should be put in a dressing. At its best, her prose was as precise as her instructions, unlike that of some of her predecessors who sometimes wrapped up advice on what to do in the kitchen with impenetrable sentences. She was a pleasure to read, a stylist of true distinction. Perhaps only in Britain would she have been classified as a "food writer", too often rather a damning phrase. Elizabeth David combined a scholar's feeling for history with the traveller-aesthete's gift of conveying a sense of place.

David's writing influenced the cultural approach of the British towards food. According to the food journalist Joanna Blythman, she "performed both a cultural and gastronomic miracle in post-war Britain by introducing the nation to a vision of fresh Continental food", while the writer Rose Prince considers that David "changed for ever the way British people cook". Janet Floyd, professor of American Literature at King's College London, argues that David was not a driver of change, but came to epitomise that change. The literary historian Nicola Humble observes that "the food revolution of the post-war years would probably have happened without Elizabeth David, though in her absence it would have happened very differently".

Floyd comments that David "showed little interest in appealing to or engaging with an audience outside a social elite"; Cooper addresses the same point, although highlights a positive review of French Provincial Cooking in The Daily Worker—a newspaper that represented the Communist Party of Great Britain—as evidence that David had a broader readership than some give her credit for.

David has appeared in fictional form at least twice. In 2000 a novel, Lunch with Elizabeth David by Roger Williams, was published by Carroll & Graf, and in 2006 the BBC broadcast Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes, a film starring Catherine McCormack as David and Greg Wise as Peter Higgins. In 1998 Lisa Chaney published a biography of David; the journalist Paul Levy found it "hasty, botched", although in The New York Times Laura Shapiro considered it "comprehensive". The following year an authorised biography, Writing at the Kitchen Table, was published by Artemis Cooper. She also wrote the entry for David in the Dictionary of National Biography in 2004 (updated in 2011). David's papers are at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Notes, references and sources

Sources

Elizabeth David Classics. London: Grub Street. 1999 [1980]. ISBN 978-1-902304-27-4. Comprising:

(pp. 1–196) A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950, rev. 1962)

(pp. 197–395) French Country Cooking (1951, rev. 1958)

(pp. 397–640) Summer Cooking (1955, rev. 1965).

Italian Food. London: Penguin. 1987 [1954]. ISBN 978-0-14-046841-0.

French Provincial Cooking. London: Penguin. 1979 [1960]. ISBN 978-0-14-046099-5.

Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1970. ISBN 978-0-14-046163-3.

English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1977. ISBN 978-0-14-046299-9.

Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices. London: Michael Joseph. 1994. ISBN 978-0-7181-3703-8.

I'll be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon. London: Penguin. 1995. ISBN 978-0-14-600020-1.

Peperonata and Other Italian Dishes. London: Penguin. 1996. ISBN 978-0-14-600140-6.

Jill Norman, ed. (1986) [1984]. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-046721-5.

South Wind Through the Kitchen: The Best of Elizabeth David. London: Michael Joseph. 1997. ISBN 978-0-7181-4168-4.

Jill Norman, ed. (2001) [2000]. Is There a Nutmeg in the House?. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-029290-9.

Further reading: works by David not cited above

The Use of Wine in Fine Cooking. London: Saccone and Speed. 1950. OCLC 315839710.

The Use of Wine in Italian Cooking. London: Saccone and Speed. 1952. OCLC 25461747.

Dried Herbs, Aromatics and Condiments. London: Kitchen Utensils. 1967. OCLC 769267360.

English Potted Meats and Fish Pates. London: Kitchen Utensils. 1968. ISBN 978-0-901794-01-7.

Syllabubs and Fruit Fools. London: Kitchen Utensils. 1969. OCLC 928158148.

The Baking of an English Loaf. London: Kitchen Utensils. 1969. ISBN 978-0-901794-00-0.

Cooking with Le Creuset. London: E D Clarbat. 1969. OCLC 86055309.

Of Pageants and Picnics. London: Penguin. 2005. ISBN 978-0-14-102259-8.

At Elizabeth David's Table: Her Very Best Everyday Recipes. London: Michael Joseph. 2010. ISBN 978-0-7181-5475-2.

A Taste of the Sun. London: Penguin. 2011. ISBN 978-0-14-196598-7.

Elizabeth David on Vegetables. London: Quadrille. 2013. ISBN 978-1-84949-268-3.